I find it strange that the leaders of our profession are so adamant about jumping on the bandwagon against tobacco use. The article "Tobacco or Oral Health: Past Progress, Impending Challenge" by Dr. Rhys B. Jones in August JADA was accurate in that I don’t ever remember any course given in my school and never heard of any course given in any other dental school that was specific on the subject of tobacco.
Perhaps it was mentioned here and there, but never was there any specific aspect of any course that dealt strictly with tobacco use and the ravages of tobacco. Yet, suddenly, we’re supposed to be experts and are supposed to be giving advice to people about tobacco use.
On the other hand, I do remember many things that were said about nutrition. There was no specific course, lecture or seminar about nutrition per se, but our biochemistry lectures, biochemistry books, physiology books and refereed journals all mention the importance of this or that nutrient or the problems associated with the lack of certain nutrients.
We’ve been told that dental caries is a dietary disease and healing is dependent on good nutrition. Many of the biochemical equations that had arrows going from one side of the equation to the other had a specific nutrient written over the arrow indicating that its presence is required.
Yet, I don’t hear anyone saying that the dentist should be a leader in telling people about nutrition, even though it’s a subject in which we were much more deeply trained than we were about tobacco use.
Am I the only one who finds this to be a curious situation? It sounds as though we are being told to speak as experts on a subject about which we’ve had little or no training and to be quiet about a subject that is not only critical in health care but is found throughout our training.
Who’s making these decisions? Which one of our leaders is asking us to do these things?
